Handstands Are Embarrassing. Yay!
“You’re embarrassing… “
That phrase once had the power to strike fear into my heart, and now it’s how I know I’m on the right track.
Image: woman (me) doing a handstand, badly.
Two years ago I gave a talk at the Content Summit in Brisbane, and I still think about the bit at the end that I kind of tacked on at the last minute without asking anyone (sorry). The presentation I was there to give was on how great the Up brand and voice are. But I found I really could not do twenty straight minutes without tacking this bit on.
The title was something like, “Make Some Dumb Shit.”
So here’s those thoughts, written down for posterity, cause I’ve been thinking about them a lot recently.
It is absolutely vital for all creative people to have a silly little outlet. To be really, truly awful at something.
And the better you are at your job? The more dumb shit you need.
We learn our craft as kids - and it turns into a career, and how wonderful! How truly amazing! it is to be so lucky as to turn it into a career. What a realisation - you can do this as a job!
But then the pressure is on. To be good at it. And to do it to someone else’s tune. And then, to stop changing.
No matter how amazing the brand or cause you work for, its voice - or artistic style - will never be perfectly your voice, and it will never allow you to grow as much as you need to grow. Even at Up - where my voice literally became the style guide - its voice was one of my voices, shaped for a particular purpose, and codified. Even in a newsletter that was designed to feel like a giant, fuzzy mess - it could never be messy in the wrong way, or have genuinely bad days, and it couldn’t swing back and forth between giant bloody paragraphs and staccato like Tarzan in the trees, just because words are fun. (They are).
Right now, I’m learning to do handstands. I’m awful at it. It’s been six months: I still can’t do one without a wall for support. I fall regularly. I’ve been practicising in the shallow end of the public pool, where the sight of a 43 year old woman upside down is not a regular occurrence. To some it’s…. confronting. I get a lot of weird looks, and on one occasion, a very confused young lifeguard asked me to stop, despite the fact that I was miles from anyone, just being upside down sometimes because the rehab pool is not for having fun rehab in.
But oh, the upsides. One, I’m learning! Look at me go - I’m upside down, and I’m not scared. Two, a kid doing therapy with his physio asked the physio.. . could I do that someday? How phenomenal that he might try. And then there’s the fact that my kids join me - they’re learning too. They’re too young to really ever think of me as ‘an embarrassment’ yet - and I have hope that before they’re teenagers, they will learn that embarrassing is what you are when you’re on the way forward. You have to be bad at something to get good, but more than that: you have to change, and find out, and remind yourself that people actually don’t, really, die of embarrassment Here I still am, intact, and a little bit better at handstands.
Frankly, at my age, I’m also old enough to teach embarrassed young lifeguards that just because someone is doing things a bit differently, they still have every right to exist, and play, and learn.
So this is my plea to you, whether you’re new in the creative game or have been here forty years:
Please don’t ever let what you are good at define you as a creator. It will keep you standing still. Be messy. Be embarrassing. Learn. It’s where all the truly great stuff comes from. It’s where you make new connections, find new ideas, explore territory you didn’t even know was there.
Also, learn to do handstands. If you can learn to be fine with falling - they’re really, really fun.
